Tomatoes: Heritage or Hate?
Like a good Quaker, he set out to practice what he refused to preach, electing to, as Quakers say, let his life speak. He told me that fostering social change was like tending a garden. Plant love and that’s what you’ll harvest.
Birdsong
I wonder how many other layers of reality I’m ignoring. How thin is the little layer of my attention? What are the trees saying? What is the sky saying?....birds seem to be calling me out of the human-words echo chamber entirely.
Sacred Spaces
Uncertainty remains. My womb may or may not be empty. I think of all the women who’ve sat on the toilet over the years, imagining that sacred space inside of them. Hoping one way. Hoping another.
STORM SHELTERS
Bethany Maile's creative nonfiction "Storm Shelters" appears in Issue No. 48: Exposure.
Friends for the Journey
Luci is part of the legacy that is L’Engle’s body of work. Listening to the women who loved the real-life L’Engle reminisce, reminded me that the work of the artist is not, and cannot be done in isolation. She was a brilliant writer, yes. But she was also a grief-stricken mother, a loving grandmother, a loyal friend.
Musings from a First-Generation Writer
“She would have checked out the book like a regular patron,” the narrator explained, “if only she had the proper documentation to get a library card. She cried when she got home, then began to read the book that night.” I didn’t take any more books from the library.
Minya, Egypt: May 26, 2017
Chaun Ballard's poem "Minya, Egypt: May 26, 2017" appears in Issue No. 48: Exposure.
Dreaming in Swiss
I’ve always found truth in dreams that I sometimes couldn’t find in real life. The life of a dream pulses on its own, as if all it needs to do in order to be is to project itself onto my being. Writing is akin to dreaming while awake.
How Ten Days of Silent Meditation Changed My Life
Sadness passes, happiness is fleeting, and neither sustain your emotional health. Change is constant, and when I use breathing techniques it's easier to meditate on the idea that pain, sadness, ecstasy, and joy are only moments that also live and die.
A Year of No Buying: A Second Quarter Report: In the Black
In our house, 2018 is A Year of No Buying....I can’t say a bad word about it.
And for the most part, my family feels the same. Or I thought they did. But then my husband went and bought a car. A gorgeous black luxury car that is, as he would like me to point out, a hybrid.
Midsummer's Eve in Indiana
My neighbor—an older woman I’d heard was a respected environmentalist in town—let her yard grow into this wild miniature forest. Her cats often peeked through the tiger lilies, their eyes wide as though they were continually surprised....I envied the ease with which she strolled through her yard, her dress like a comfortable pillowcase wrapped around her body, her hair gray and unkempt.
Reconciling Humility and Self-Worth in the Age of Ego
The light you will gather and spread in this world is uniquely tinted, and if you choose not to shine this light, in the words of the great Martha Graham, it would be lost to all of us. You are a child of creation. Shine what you have, and be brave.
Mystery and Familiarity in Arches National Park
While entering Arches National Park, it is near impossible to stand beneath these natural rock formations and still be worried by the generalities of life. Life, as you have known it, is suddenly on pause. Your life transitions into snapshots as you wander the land in awe, feigning focus on putting one foot in front of the other while your eyes are bound to the monoliths that breach the sky.
The Writing Impulse
I find I write a lot of stuff like this. Moments of humiliation, large and small. Attacks against which we are incapable of defending ourselves, for whatever reason. And here’s why: once they’re written down, they’re different. I’ve gotten addicted to the alchemy of writing, where those moments of pain and humiliation become beautiful and useful.
The Worst Dog That Ever Dogged
I grieve and yet I celebrate. My heart breaks and is stitched back together with the semi-toothless grin of a 5-year-old. I ache and yet I rejoice at all the gifts of the past 12 years, of who my family has become in that time.
The Meaning is in the Waiting
I’ve always thought of waiting as a passive thing. As a sign of inefficiency, uselessness, the lack of any sense of calling or progress....But what if waiting is a space we are led into, difficult as it might be? What if waiting is a lens, through which we actively engage with the world?
Finding a Vocabulary of the Heart: What Poetry Has Taught Me about Prayer
So if poetry, like all other art, is an aesthetic statement, how can it also be prayer?...All I know is that when I began to pen my laments, not only did the poems emerge as prayers, but these prayers were wilder, more daring, and more honest than any prayer I might have fumbled through on my knees.
Show Your Work: How Do You Know What You Know?
Writers, our readers aren’t going to find us out. We’re not playing pretend. Our writing isn’t a performance. We’re simply in conversation with our readers, and we’re showing them how we know what we know at this point in time.
Sharing the Couch: A Reflection on Physical Hospitality
Deep love must intersect with the physical, and the point of contact is hospitality: sharing space, sharing time, sharing stories. It’s putting yourself aside so a friend can breathe deep and stretch out full length. Love is the invitation: “stay.”
Editors Ruminate: On Haunting
The four long poems in this issue will haunt you. You will see in them the faces of children who have been relegated to sacrifice zones; how the smallest measure of matter becomes the destroyer of worlds; how a home buckles under the weight of its history.
On Winning the VanderMey Nonfiction Prize
It came to me one dark evening on the bus during a gray and sloppy Chicago winter that felt like it would never end...That this piece about loss won something, won Ruminate’s VanderMey Nonfiction Prize no less, was quite a shock, quite the ironic twist.
The Parameters of Need
We all face varying necessities...but we also contend with our desires—the hunger to thrive. The nature of our own ambivalence sends us off on endless searches. And we each, when we’re self-honest, find ourselves in this territory: segueing from wanting what we truly need, to an equivocal choice of “needing” what we badly want.
To Remember a Stranger: On the Hospitality of Thought
Surely, I believe what the old Black spirituals say: Even when discarded by the world, there is one who holds us in hand or in mind, and this is sufficient. But it must also mean something to be held in the memory of people, however faulty...
On Winning the Kalos Art Prize
The Noli Me Tangere images published in Ruminate show the Filipino sights and textures that made up my childhood–from jeepneys to religious processions. The Kalos Art Prize offered me a way to announce the deep and heartfelt relationship I have with my extended family in my birth country.
Of JAGGED LITTLE PILL and Possibility
Yes, I had witnessed the tears falling every night. I felt the energy whoosh through the room like a cyclone. I couldn’t believe anyone could walk away from that show and not be transformed. And I know that Diane also felt and understood the transformative power of theater.
Eyes to See the Orange Trees
I remember when the sight of the white doves fluttering around the Seville Cathedral would soothe me with thoughts of world peace, Aphrodite and the Holy Spirit. A dozen years later, I lump the doves in with the pigeons: birds of a feather. . . rats with wings.
Mother-Woman
I do my best, but sometimes my best is not enough. I can’t sooth one because I’m feeding another; I lose my temper in the tempest of yelling, and add my voice to the chaos. I feed them corndogs instead of cauliflower.
The Steady Climb and the Sweetness
We agree to one rule: we are here together, but we journey alone. I make a personal rule: no breaks, just constant motion. Slow and steady, or even slower and steady – but always steady.
Why I Write Sad Stories
Every day seems to unearth yet another story of violence and abuse, repeating the never-ending pattern of the powerful stealing from the disadvantaged their few remaining possessions...But the truth is that you don’t have to do a lot of searching to find the beauty in this world. You just have to have your eyes open.
Our House Finches
When Tim first chose Orthodoxy, I knew he was a heretic. Gently, mind you—I mused as if rescuing a fallen baby finch from our oregano plant beneath the window blind. “There, there, Dear,” I imagined one day saying to him. “Everybody takes faith detours; just glad you got your thinking back in line with mine.”
Being Ready: The Myth of the Muse
I have eaten my weight in words. I have a book deadline, and I’m not at all close to finishing in time. For someone like me, who usually thrives on a deadline, it’s disconcerting. I have not been avoiding the task of writing this latest book, I promise.
Rocks
My children struggle to accept the inevitability of death—I think because it’s so absurd. To be born, to grow and learn and live, only to stop? It might be the most ridiculous thing they have ever heard.
Testament
On this bright midwinter morning, face after face shines with familiarity, including several people who have not crossed my view in years. Whether or not we are currently connected doesn’t matter; even if we knew each other best at 15, that is enough.
Again and Again
One breath. One coin. One baby step. Again and again and again until we turn our heads and see a thousand steps in our rearview––until we see how we’ve changed...It's okay. Tomorrow, we begin again.
Poems for Mother's Day
In celebration of mothers and mother figures, we share three poems from past issues of Ruminate.
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The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.